September 2018
ECM 2583
Format: CD
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Is music for the whole body or just your brain?
Depends on the day and your mood, I would argue.
CD Music
August 2018
Yep Roc 2587
Format: CD
Musical Performance
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Scratch the surface of Americana music -- the top layer that includes Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Jason Isbell -- and you’ll find dozens of performers whose career paths have seldom-if-ever taken them to soft-seat concert halls. These are the hardcore singer-songwriters who spend most of each year driving up and down American highways to beer joints, small venues, and the occasional festival. Better-known musicians may cite them as core influences and industry treasures, but chances are the average fan doesn’t know a thing about them.
June 2018
Legacy 19075827252
Format: CD
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Here’s the thing: Willie Nelson is 85 years old, and I’ve given up on him making another Red Headed Stranger. That’s okay; one album like that 1975 genre-defying masterpiece surpasses what most musicians accomplish in a lifetime -- even one as long and productive as Nelson has lived.
Columbia/Legacy 88985448392
Format: 4 CDs
Musical Performance
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At the dawn of the 1960s, trumpeter Miles Davis -- then 33 -- was on the cusp of reaching a new level in his career. Five years into a lucrative recording contract with Columbia Records, he was, along with Duke Ellington, the only black musician in the upper echelons of the prestigious label’s roster. His band -- featuring saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb -- was a popular attraction throughout the US. Supplemented by saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and pianist Bill Evans, the band had released Kind of Blue four months earlier, and the album was already garnering the critical reception that would eventually make it one of the most respected recordings in the history of jazz. Outside of music, Davis was being cited by cultural observers like Playboy magazine as an icon of sartorial and behavioral style. He wore tailored Italian suits, drove a Ferrari, lived in a three-story brownstone on New York City’s Upper West Side, and was married to an equally fashionable former Broadway dancer.
April 2018
Experience Hendrix/Legacy
Format: CD
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Sometime in the mid-’70s, one of Rolling Stone’s waggish music critics began a review of one of the pastiche post-mortem recordings that surfaced in the decade after Jimi Hendrix’s death on September 18, 1970, with the words “Scrape, scrape.”
March 2018
Water Is Life 13
Format: CD
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For an artist with a wholly individual technique and a career that spanned only 25 years, guitarist Django Reinhardt’s posthumous influence on popular music is challenged only by that of Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker. Sixty-five years after his death, at the age of 43, Reinhardt’s melodic fluency, harmonic sophistication, and rhythmic flow not only set the bar for jazz guitarists but gave birth to an informal school of followers that flourishes worldwide.
February 2018
Legacy 19075802312
Format: CD
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All hail the riff. From the elemental, slow-motion growl of Link Wray’s “Rumble” through Keith Richards’s just-woke-from-my-coma fuzzy progression of “Satisfaction” onward, guitar-based rock has lived or died on memorable note choices. As advanced as amplification, electronic effects, and recording technology have become, it still comes down to how you make that joyful noise on your six strings.
January 2018
Anti- 87557
Format: CD
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As a child in Chicago, Mavis Staples idolized Mahalia Jackson, a towering figure in gospel music who attained such stature that she was invited to perform at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. Young Mavis got first-hand exposure to Jackson through the established performer’s friendship with Roebuck “Pops” Staples, the patriarch of the Staple Singers and an important -- though often overlooked -- link between the seminal Mississippi Delta guitarists and the urban gospel-soul of artists like Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, and Marvin Gaye.
- Details
- CD music
December 2017
Kwimu Music
Format: CD
Musical Performance
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When you’ve heard someone play music as often as I’ve heard Ottawa-based guitarist Roddy Ellias over the past 40 years, it’s easy to overlook some of the things you hear; not to say that you ever actually take their musicianship for granted. With the 68-year-old Ellias, who has been more than a passing acquaintance for much of those four decades, it’s not so much familiarity or ubiquity that contributes to that state as his quiet self-deprecation. He’s so low key that it’s easy to forget that he’s both a world-class player and composer.
- Details
- CD music
November 2017
Megaforce
Format: CD
Musical Performance
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Overall Enjoyment
Outrageously overlooked in the annals of recent rock history in favor of other mid-’80s bands like Metallica and Guns N’ Roses, Living Colour is back, and sounding tougher than ever. The quartet’s sixth album -- its first since 2009 -- is an extended meditation on the blues that is stuffed full of slamming guitar hooks and uncompromising social commentary.
- Gregg Allman: "Southern Blood"
- Vijay Iyer Sextet: "Far from Over"
- Randall Bramblett: "Juke Joint at the Edge of the World"
- Steve Coleman's Natal Eclipse: "Morphogenesis"
- Valerie June: "The Order of Time"
- Delbert McClinton & Self-Made Men: "Prick of the Litter"
- Brian Eno: "Reflection"
- BassDrumBone: "The Long Road"
- Keith Jarrett: "A Multitude of Angels"
- Norah Jones: "Day Breaks"
- Metalwood: "Twenty"
- Nels Cline: "Lovers"
- Paul Simon: "Stranger to Stranger"
- The Allman Brothers Band: "Live from A&R Studios, New York, August 26, 1971"
- Pat Metheny: "The Unity Sessions"
- Wes Montgomery: "In the Beginning"
- Charles Lloyd & the Marvels: "I Long to See You"
- David Bowie: "Blackstar"
- John Abercrombie: "The First Quartet"
- Billy Gibbons and the BFGs: "Perfectamundo"
- Keith Richards: "Crosseyed Heart"
- Blue Buddha: "Blue Buddha"; Dave Douglas Quintet: "Brazen Heart"
- Jason Isbell: "Something More Than Free"
- Ryan Adams: "Ten Songs from Live at Carnegie Hall"
- Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell: "The Traveling Kind"
- Laura Marling: "Short Movie"
- Ted Kooshian: "Clowns Will Be Arriving"
- Suzie LeBlanc: "La Veillée de Noël"
- The Villains: "A Little Something for the Pain"
- Henry Mancini: "Music for Peter Gunn"
- Barb Jungr: "Hard Rain: The Songs of Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen"
- Jeremy Fox: "With Love"
- Will Kimbrough: "Sideshow Love"
- A.J. Croce: "Twelve Tales"
- The Iveys: "Jenna's Song"
- The Dave Miller Trio with Rebecca DuMaine: "Better Than Anything"
- Bob Dorough: "Eulalia"
- Charlotte de Rothschild and Danielle Perrett: "Christmas Lullabies"
- Tchaikovsky/Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn: "Nutcracker Suites"
- Tianna Hall and Chris Cortez: "Noel"
- Tim Warfield: "Tim Warfield’s Jazzy Christmas"
- Gina Kronstadt: "Come Over"
- The Swingle Singers: "Weather to Fly"
- Tierney Sutton: "After Blue"
- Cheryl Bentyne and Mark Winkler: "West Coast Cool"
- Lorraine Feather: "Attachments"
- Lyn Stanley: "Lost in Romance"
- Randi Tytingvåg: "Lights Out"
- Vincent Cross: "A Town Called Normal"
- Nancy Harms: "Dreams in Apartments"
- Abigail Riccards: "Every Little Star"
- George Shearing & Don Thompson: "George Shearing at Home"
- Matthew Morrison: "Where It All Began"
- Thisbe Vos: "Under Your Spell"
- Mustered Courage: "Powerlines"
- Denise King & Olivier Hutman: "Give Me The High Sign"
- Thomas Gansch and Georg Breinschmid: "Gansch & Breinschmid Live"
- Ben Sidran: "Don’t Cry for No Hipster"
- Raquel Bitton: "Rhythm of the Heart"
- Frank Vignola & Vinny Raniolo: "Melody Magic"
- Laila Salins: "Elevator into the Sky"
- Tim Mahoney Band: "Shine Through"
- The Summarily Dismissed: "To Each!"
- Will Scruggs Jazz Fellowship: "Song of Simeon: A Christmas Journey"
- Dallas Wind Symphony; Jerry Junkin, Conductor: "Horns for the Holidays"
- Jacqui Sutton: "Notes from the Frontier: A Musical Journey"
- Barluath: "Source"
- Letizia Gambi: "Introducing Letizia Gambi"
- Fiona Apple: "The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do"
- Susie Arioli: "All the Way"
- Georg Breinschmid: "Fire"
- Hiroe Sekine: "After the Rainfall"
- Jamie Ousley: "A Sea of Voices"
- Bill Toms: "Memphis"
- The SSJ All-Stars: "From California With Love"
- Dale Ann Bradley: "Somewhere South of Crazy"
- Duda Lucena Quartet: "Live"
- Stevie Nicks: "In Your Dreams"
- Megan Slankard: "A Token of the Wreckage"
- Take 6: "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year"
- "Christmas with The Washington Chorus"
- Esperanza Spalding: "Chamber Music Society"
- John Escreet: "Don't Fight the Inevitable"
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